Number of the Month

December 2003

Employers
find more pitfalls in new legislationEMPLOYERS
phoning Peninsula, the employment law firm, for advice are put on hold to an
appropriate tune — Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

With
the number of new employment laws spiralling and employees becoming ever more
litigious, business at the employment law firm, one of Britain’s biggest, is
booming….But the firm recognises that employers, struggling to get to grips
with the new laws being imposed upon them both from the UK and Europe, are not
so happy.

This
week sees the arrival of the latest batch of employment regulations with the
introduction, yesterday, of new laws banning discrimination on the grounds of
sexual orientation — whether homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality —
and today, of laws banning discrimination on the grounds of religion.

Under
the new laws, which will bring the UK into line with EU law, any employer who
discriminates either directly or indirectly on these grounds faces being taken
to a tribunal and it is vital to take measures to prepare.

Neither
employers nor business groups dispute the worthiness of new regulations such as
these. Their complaint, they say, is about the cost to them of the cumulative
impact of a stream of new employment laws.

“There
are at least five things employers can be taken to tribunal for now before they
have even employed someone,” explains Michael Huss, director of employment law
at Peninsula.

“These
sex and religion laws, for example, extend to the interview process.”

For
employers, these new laws are particularly thorny because, unusually, they cover
perception as well as reality: “Because of this the scope for allegations is
enormous,” says David Whincup, head of employment law at Hammonds, the
employment law firm.

“An
employee can take a case on the grounds that they feel the boss is being horrid
to them because he thinks they are Catholic, for example.”

As
with all employment law, the onus lies with the employer to educate himself
about each new law and its implications, put in place the right procedures and
ensure that they are followed out........

UK insurance giant Norwich Union has
told staff that it will cut 2,350 jobs in
the UK and export the work to India.

Parent firm Aviva said operating costs
in India were typically 30-40% lower than in the UK and that the move would also
help it provide 24-hour services.

The Amicus trade union criticised the
decision to move the jobs to India as "despicable" and vowed to fight
it. ……..

Unions have warned that up to 200,000
jobs in the finance sector could leave the UK over the next five years as
companies take advantage of cheaper labour costs abroad.

Advice for those thinking
of starting a business in the UK

Don’t

Horror story

One of the benefits of being a pessimist and a nasty old
cynic is that you don’t get many unpleasant surprises but, unfortunately, when
you do get one it’s a whopper. This is especially stark when you have been
complaining for years that something is really bad and then you find that it is
far worse than you could possibly have imagined. The Daily Telegraph has
just published a series on the real state of Britain’s National Health
Service, said to be the third largest organisation in the world. It is all
summarised in an editorial
that, in the circumstances, is quite restrained.

People are induced by the media to panic about a minor
epidemic half a world away (SARS), when the greatest hazard they face is lurking
in their local hospital. Britons who are poor or uninsured face one of the
biggest hazards of their lives when they are thrown into a filthy local hospital,
crawling with managers and resistant staphylococcus aureus. There is something
poignantly symbolic of modern times about a nurse who has a university degree
but has not been taught to wash her hands between patients: this in the country
that gave birth to Joseph Lister and Florence Nightingale.

At the heart of the problem is the relentless
data-gathering that is the raison d’être of the modern bureaucrat.
Hospitals are required to run two data systems, one to mismanage the institution
and one to satisfy the teeming bureaucrats in the ministry. Could Orwell or
Kafka have dreamed up a hospital system that has more managers than beds?

What does the Government do about it? It throws in more
money, wrested from the taxpayer, to employ more managers.

If you think there is no connection between this story and
those above, think again. It is the fear of exerting discipline, as did the old
fashioned hospital matrons, that is killing people.

And the statistical fight
back

The establishment riposte to the above criticism of the NHS
was not long in coming. In fact, it came the next day in a Times
article by our old friend Nigel (Thousands to die) Hawkes; and guess what!
It took the form of reams of official statistics.

The figures, to be released today in a report by
Sir Nigel Crisp, the NHS chief executive, will delight ministers, who have
waited anxiously for signs that the massive investment in the NHS is paying
off.

The most impressive figures in his report cover
the fall in patients waiting more than six months for an operation. When the NHS
Plan was launched three years ago that stood at 264,370. In the next two years
it fell by only 5.9 per cent to 248,690 in September 2002. In the past year that
fell by 28.5 per cent, to 177,867.

“We’ll hit the targets,” Sir Nigel said
yesterday. “There’s still a long way to go, but people have done very well.
We are seeing accelerating change in the NHS.”

Hands up all those who thought they would not meet their
targets. You do not employ 270,000 managers to manipulate your data and then
miss the targets. Of course, to understand official statistics you have to be
familiar with the use of weasel words:

Operation
numbers are up and there has been a huge increase in outpatient procedures,
freeing beds to help to clear the waiting lists.

This translates as “We are solving the bed situation by
not letting the patients into the beds in the first place.” No doubt the
patients are grateful not to be exposed to all the filth and staphylococci, but
they exchange that for the risks of not having trained staff on hand in the
event of complications.

At the end there is a grudging mention of the report that
triggered off the Telegraph series of articles:

Harriet
Sergeant, author of Managing Not To Manage, carried out detailed interviews
with staff across the NHS. She described an “obsessive desire for
information” from the Department of Health.

One
A&E manager said that her difficulties were not caused by violence, number
of patients or problems with staff but by “the bureaucracy and the endless
meetings”.

but no mention of the squalor.

Of pots and kettles

Incidentally, on the previous day there was the usual junk
tobacco story:

WOMEN
are twice as likely as men to develop lung cancer from smoking, scientists
have found.

New
research has suggested that gender can determine whether a smoker contracts
the disease — which kills 80 per cent of sufferers within a year of
diagnosis.

Hardly worth mentioning except for the identity of the
person who delivered the justified criticism:

Other
experts, however, were sceptical of the figures, which are based on 77 cases.
Sir Richard Peto, of Cancer Research UK’s Clinical Trials Service Unit in
Oxford, said: “This is a very small study and its conclusions may well be
wrong. It’s simply not true that men and women who smoke have very different
lung cancer rates.

Peto was the author, with Doll, of the 1981 book The
causes of cancer, which elevated the cause of junk statistics to new
heights.

Yawn

The Times Global Warming Myth Propaganda Machine seems to
be running out of ideas. The headline
is:

Global warming puts heat on tour
operators

but the story is the same old threat to the winter sports
industry.

Suffer and die.
It's good for you!

The scaremongers are having a go at HRT, yet again. The
banner headline
on the front of the Daily Telegraph for Friday December 5th
read:

Bone specialist quits in protest at curb
on 'safe' HRT

Make no mistake about it; this headline marks a substantial
victory for the scaremongers. Without a singlerelative
risk of an acceptable level, the pundits have condemned millions of women to
the miseries of the menopause, the agonies of broken bones and the risk of death
as the result of fractures. The loony epidemiologists and their cronies manage
to pack these committees and sit in cold judgment on the lives of ordinary
people and the media lap up their foolish proclamations. We have seen it so many
times, radiation that was not radiation for example (see Professors
of Panic). As the caring medics, like Prof Purdie, and the real scientists
withdraw from these farcical proceedings, so the divorce of the medical
establishment from real science becomes firmer and the new puritans take
control. Heaven forefend that middle-aged women should get some enjoyment out of
their lives! This was also the week in which The Lancet called for
smoking to be criminalized, inevitably on the basis of the imaginary body count
of 1000 deaths from passive smoking.

each year there are 50,000
fractures of the distal forearm, 50,000 hip fractures, and 40,000 clinically
diagnosed vertebral fractures

22.5% of women aged 50 and
over have osteoporosis of the hip

progressive bone loss over
the years may amount to as much as 30-40%

as many as 20% of patients
who survive a hip fracture may die within one year

the average length of
hospital stay for patients with hip fracture is 23 days

of those patients who do
survive, more than 50% will be severely disabled—many of them permanently.
Only one third of survivors regain full mobility

Osteoporosis is a disease that will affect 50% of women by the age of 80. One
in five women will die following hip fracture, and osteoporosis is directly
linked to more than 14 premature deaths each and every day. These are real
deaths, not theoretical body counts from statistically insignificant
epidemiological surveys.

Ploy

Meanwhile, back to the Lancet.
It is, of course, one of the oldest ploys in the world. You get one party to put
forward a proposal so outrageous that it makes your own extremism look moderate.
The media fell for it hook, line and cliché, though of course, much of the
reaction is disingenuous. The Times of December 6th had no
fewer than three articles, one of which was an editorial. Naturally the zealots
at ASH received maximum exposure. Denying that they wanted to do anything so
extreme, they took the opportunity of repeating the big lie about 120,000
British deaths a year to back up their proposals for banning the sacrilege in
public places. The stratagem allowed the lie to be inserted into every tabloid
newspaper. There were at least half a dozen other groups of zealots, all
trotting out the other big lie of 1,000 dying from passive smoking.

How do we know the 120,000 is a lie? Well, the British
zealots are careful not to let you know how they calculate it, but pro rata it
is 50% higher than the American figure estimated by the CDC, which has been comprehensively
exposed as fraudulent. The figure of 1,000 is, of course, pure
epidemiological fantasy, supported by not one iota of scientifically acceptable
evidence.

Rising tension

Approaching mid December and the time of year when the
palatial headquarters of Number Watch International are besieged by reporters
looking for hints as to who are going to be the lucky recipients of the 2003
Numby awards. They are, of course, wasting their time. By tradition the
distinguished Board of Electors goes into solemn conclave in a sealed building
and has no communication with the outside world until it has come to a decision.
This used to be indicated by a change in colour of the smoke emerging from the
solitary chimney from white to black but, because of fears that this will add to
global warming, it is now announced by a change in the colour of the bed linen
traditionally draped on the sill of an upper window.

Some readers have wondered how the organisers of the award
ceremony manage to achieve such a glittering attendance. Well, between
ourselves, the simple trade secret is that they post a notice in the Resting
Actors’ Club announcing that free snoek bagels will be provided, accompanied
by brimming glasses of Chateuneuf de Middle Wallop and Schloss Uber Wallop
Silvaner Spätlese Trocken.

Aliens cause global
warming

Our man in Puerto Rico draws attention to a remarkably fine
lecture
at Caltech by Michael
Crichton. He will forever be associated with his fictional invention of the
“grey goo” nanobots, which were taken literally by such extraordinarily
credulous notables as the British heir to the throne and the Astronomer Royal,
but he says with great precision much of what Number Watch has been
trying to say throughout its existence.

O.K., give up, surrender! It does have to
be spelled out. With both proponents and opponents of Nanotechnology, for
their own nefarious purposes, grossly exaggerating its potential;
the grey goo argument simply refuses to go away. This was a fictional invention
by Michael Crichton. It is no more going to happen than his Jurassic dinosaurs
are going to roam the earth again. Here is the Number Watch FAQ
on the matter.

The Bible Cod

Here
is a little seasonal gift for all those lost souls who have made BIBLE CODE by
far the most popular search term in Number Watch.

The junk scientist
as hero

On December 16th Channel Five television in the
UK broadcast a dramatisation entitled “Hear the silence” about the
putative link between the MMR vaccine, inflammatory bowel disease and autism. It
was what the critics like to call a powerful drama, packed with stock
characters, or caricatures, the determined mother in a lone fight against the
wooden and evasive medical establishment, the sceptical father who finally sees
the light, the evil international drug companies and mysterious forces tapping
’phones and cutting off research funds. The climax, however, was reached when
the hero from real life made his entrance, they stopped short of soft focus and
a halo, but it was reminiscent of the scene in Olivier’s film of Richard
III when the usurper Henry Tudor (played by the young Stanley Baker before
he matured into the epitome of
evil) entered in a golden glow to reverential music by William Walton. For
it was none other than Andrew Wakefield (see Let
the bandwagons role and The
new lords of misrule). How this good, kind and wise hero contrasted with the
cold villainy of the rest of the medical establishment!

It takes one back to an earlier example, here as reported
in Sorry, wrong number!:

I had originally drafted a
paragraph welcoming the forced retirement of an Aberdeen scientist who in August
1998 had prematurely published the results of a botched experiment by way of a
scare story on a television programme. It seemed a small victory in the battle
against of junk science. I had, however, reckoned without the combined
power of SIFs and the media. Quite suddenly in February 1999 the scientist in
question, one Dr Pusztai, became an overnight star and one of the most
spectacular media feeding frenzies ever occurred. It is an exemplar of the whole
genre. The trigger was a presentation by a group of twenty scientists made a
presentation at the House of Commons. We suddenly had the junk scientist as
hero. No fewer than twenty nine separate SIF groups combined to exploit the
resulting furore. Politicians who tried to ride the storm were overwhelmed and
panic legislation ensued. It was probably the most successful generated scare
ever.

Who remembers Dr Pusztai now? But he served his purpose and
the Frankenfoodscare rolls on with
growing success. Number Watch holds no brief for the medical
establishment, as a scroll through this page will show, but it is even less
enamoured with solo scare mongers who put lives at risk in their search for
glory.

Footnote: A reader points out that
this is one of those occasions when the epidemiologists were the good guys, as
was the Guardian, which produced a first class article by Ben
Goldacre on the subject. Credit where it is due and damnation to Channel
Five, who will have deaths and deformities on their consciences, if they have
any.

Credo

I believe for every drop of rain that falls a
flower grows
Graham, Shirl, Drake and Stillman (yes, it took four of them!)

It was three years ago (December 2000) in the first year of
Number Watch that we discovered the phenomenon of the sceptic who
believes, but number watcher Ray Futrell has discovered a new and equally
exquisite example. The
second half of this diatribe must be one of the finest exhibitions of credulity
in the canon.

There is, of course, a more sinister interpretation, that
failure to believe is a mortal sin that should not go unpunished. Time was when
it was the duty of all scientists to be sceptical. Now that religion, in the
form of the new eco-theology, has re-established its grip, we might all have to
recant like Galileo or face dire consequences.

Old faithful

It is reassuring that there is still some constancy in this changing world.
Nigel (thousands to die) Hawkes has come across a new vCJD scare and introduces
it in The
Times of December 18 in his own inimitable style:

THOUSANDS of people who have had blood transfusions
since 1996 could be at risk of developing the human form of “mad cow”
disease.

Blood transfusions have been identified as a potential route of
infection for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), for which there is no
treatment or cure....

The
third annual Numby Awards

The Balls Pond
Road was in seasonal festive mood with lights flashing red, green and amber.
They were, however, outshone by the powerful lights erected by the TV crews.
Next year they have promised to bring cameras. Distinguished participants milled
about in the foyer leading to the stairs up to the glamorous assembly rooms
above the Takeaway Kebab, removing waterproofs and bicycle clips. The air was
filled with the sounds of air kisses, “Mwaagh” and “Daahling”.

The master of ceremonies for the occasion was Old
Ned, emeritus environmental correspondent for Number Watch. He had
become bored with his retirement, brought about by unexpected wealth from wind
farming, and he is now taking a degree in Chat Show Hosting at the Metropolitan
University of Nether Wallop. The presentations were made by Baroness Eckerslyke,
Junior Minister for Truth and Stuff.

The Baroness began by noting that one of the recipients for
the 2002 Numbies had been her
distinguished colleague, Gordon Brown, and she emphasised that his achievements
had not stopped there. He has managed to fund the vitally needed extra managers
in the public service, yet has only had to impose a 50%
increase in taxation with only sixty
individual tax increases that people scarcely noticed.

Thanks to endowments by external organisations, there were
two new awards to be made this year. The first was endowed by the Brotherhood of
the Holy Environment and it will be known as the Unknown Soldier Award.
All the great religious faiths of the world depend not on the prominent prophets
or the globetrotting archbishops. No, it is the common foot-soldiers who spread
the word. The award goes to a correspondent to the Blackmore Vale Magazine about
the proposal to beautify the Vale with a giant array of religious icons. The
judges described it as “a short piece, but one in which every word is redolent
of meaning”:

Wind turbines

(Copy of
letter sent to Somerton and Frome MP, David Heath}
I am fully in support of any means possible to stop the planet's
destruction and reduce the demand on fossil fuels that are creating green-house
gasses.
These turbines will in the future, be looked at with the same affection as we
look at Stonehenge today and be of far more use in saving our children's
inheritance.
As a Liberal MP I expect you to actively support their erection. I would hope
you can voice opposition to the narrow minded and selfish attitude to
opposition.
The only way to save the Vale for our children and their children is build
turbines and not look at the immediate selfish view of a very narrow minority.
Without turbines in 100 years plus there will be no Vale to save. Only a desert.
Please note I will see the turbines from my home as my home overlooks the
Blackmore Vale.

J MelIor,
Shaftesbury

The second of
the new awards has been sponsored by the IPPC (not to be confused with the IPCC,
which is quite different – well, actually not all that different – well a
bit different – well not very different at all – but different, anyway).
IPPC is the Institute for Propagation of Political Correctness, who have donated
the Conformity Cup in addition to the coveted Numby. This was shared by the
twelve presidents of medical institutions who, in a letter to The Times,
called for the abolition of smoking in public. The citation noted their single
mindedness in concentrating on the 1,000 theoretical (only nasty old cynics say
imaginary) deaths from passive smoking and not being deflected by such trivial
considerations as the 5,000 real corpses resulting from infections contracted in
festering state hospitals.

There was little doubt about who would receive the
two top awards. In fact the leading bookmakers had stopped taking bets by mid
summer.

The Woman of the Year award was this year
donated by the Sisters of the Abbey of St Rachel of the Silent Spring. In giving
the award to Margot Wallström, the
distinguished panel concentrated less on her wonderful religious inspiration and
more on her enormous single-handed efforts to return Europe to the glories of
its past. Thanks to her, Europe can once again become the labour-intensive
agricultural monoculture that it was in the glory days, unsullied by the scars
of modern industry. Not only that, but European traditions, such as the great
plagues that swept through the continent at regular intervals, can be restored.
The first of the new Great Plagues of Europe (affectionately known as Margot’s
Murrains) was so aptly timed, affecting turkeys on the build up to Christmas and
fostered by just one of hundreds of bans of chemicals instituted by the European
Commissioner. It all just goes to demonstrate what one obscure politician can
achieve when untrammelled by the constraints of democracy. Without her, it is
extremely doubtful whether Europe could have come anywhere near achieving its
target of zero economic growth.

The Man of the Year award was also much of a forgone
conclusion. The citation paraphrased The Bard:

Why,
Mann, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Mann achieved fame by the creation of the famous Hockey
Stick, which the IPPC adopted as its leitmotiv. Thereby he banished from
history both the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, despite all the
evidence from art, literature, entomology and other disciplines. The Hockey
Stick became the main prop for the Kyoto, treaty, so Mann can rightly claim to
have had more effect on the world economy than any individual since Adolf
Hitler.

When upstart underlings had the temerity to challenge his
dicta he reacted with the magisterial certainty of the true mullah, pouring
scorn, with the aid of no fewer than thirteen acolytes, upon the journal
that allowed such heresy to pass into the public domain. Thus he was able to
confirm the return of science to its proper place denied since the time of
Galileo as the hand servant of true religion. Indubitably a man of global
and historical significance, he is clearly worthy of the highest award
available to the distinguished board of judges for the Numbies.

As is the usual practice, the base of the statuette was
engraved with a quotation from one of the world’s great works of philosophy.
In this case, the chosen quotation was “The truth is out there”.
Unfortunately, our engraver started out with a choice of lettering that was too
large, so the last word had to be omitted, but the sentiment was still
adequately expressed.

In contrast, the more dubious award for Party Poopers
of the year goes to McIntyre and McKitrick of Ontario. Despite the just
opprobrium visited on the earlier heretics, they had the audacity to try
to repudiate Mann’s revelation and (worse) to do so by attempting to
reproduce his own methods. This is not only considered very unsporting in
establishment circles, to say nothing of lese-majesty, it is also forbidden for
the unordained to meddle in such mysteries as applying the methods of linear
algebra to highly non-linear systems.

In her final address, the Minister expressed her
disappointment that the major awards had gone to foreigners. After all Britain
has one of the most productive state-controlled number-generating industries in
the world. Nevertheless she was obliged to concede that true merit must be
recognised.

The streets of Islington, the spiritual home of New Labour,
had fallen into a dank and sullen silence, but it was suddenly broken as the
assembly room doors were flung open and the milling crowd spilled out onto the
pavement. Briefly, gay mirth filled the air, and from within could be heard the
sound of the Over Wallop Silver Band playing their final number, the new hit
single from the wonder boy band, The Plonk, “Don’t they know we’re
having sex for Christmas?” The crowds slowly drifted away and gradually the
streets returned to their habitual nocturnal somnolence. A gentle drizzle bathed
Islington Green. Was it imagination or did the site of the long gone Collins
Music Hall echo with the faint sound of hollow laughter from generations past?

Number of the month - One

This is the total number of mad cow cases reported
this year in the USA. It will be interesting to see how much general panic,
bureaucratic incompetence and media hype it induces, compared with the British
effort. There will also be the seizure of the opportunity for pursuing a trade
war (a couple of dozen countries have already banned American beef) and the
thinly veiled schadenfreude exhibited by the Brits, who had their turn on
the receiving end. It is also another neat little windfall for Stanley Prusiner,
whose nice little earner looked as though it were going to fall flat. The New
York Times was remarkably
sane about it all.

Other numbers to savour (from The Times of
December 28) as this story develops are the 348 million
steaks sold in American restaurants per year and the 352,000
Big Macs sold yearly to the 1,045
inhabitants of Irwindale, California. No doubt they will show the stoical
fortitude that is the hallmark of their state and carry on eating.

Number of the year - 137

This is the total number of vCJD deaths recorded ever.
It was meant to be millions, but something went wrong somewhere. It all but
destroyed the British beef industry. If this is not exciting enough how about
the total of 774 deaths ever from
SARS? That caused a temporary economic collapse in south east Asia. For a really
boring comparison consider the 20 million
deaths from influenza in 1918 alone. The important thing to remember is that Panic
Sells Papers.